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When was the last time software billed as a "communication platform" actually made you more productive?

If we measure productivity by the number of emails we get in our inbox every day, we’re doing great. If we measure it by the number of tweets we receive, the Facebook posts we read and the meetings we attend, wow, are we productive.

Business communication is broken because most of the tools at hand kill more productivity, time and money than they create. To recover, we need to evolve from a model of indiscriminate emailing, posting and meeting to a future of targeted conversations.

Communication Overload is Burning Cash

I’ve made some big accusations against email, social media and meetings, but how damaging are they?

The most recent study on email comes from Dr. Ian M. Paul, a pediatrician at Penn State College of Medicine. Dr. Paul kept track of all his emails for an academic year and found that 2,035 mass distribution emails were received: 1,501 from the medical center, 450 from his department and 84 from the university.

Estimating that each took 30 seconds to read, and taking into account the average salary of doctors at the institution, email overload cost about $1,641 per physician per year. With more than 629 doctors on staff, that’s equates to more than $1 million in lost time.

Other studies have placed time lost to email higher. According to McKinsey, high-skill knowledge workers spend 28% of their workweek managing e-mail. Increasing the productivity of social technologies could contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value across commercial sectors in the U.S. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine found that office workers are interrupted roughly every three minutes and once interrupted it can take 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task.

Basex’s numbers do not include distractions from Facebook, , , Snapchat and other social sites. Thankfully, Learn Stuff looked into this one for us: social media distractions may cost the U.S. economy $650 billion per year. Old-fashioned meetings are revenue killers too: in 2011, a survey conducted by Opinion Matters for Epson and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) found that UK office workers wasted two hours and 39 minutes in meetings each week, costing the economy £26 billion per year.

If broken communication is draining over $1.5 trillion per year in the U.S. alone, clearly we need to rethink our approach to communication.

Portrait of the Email as a Time Killer

Have you ever played the "instant messaging game" with email?

You email a question to Bob, and then Bob replies back with a cryptic answer, so you email Bob again. There’s about a five-minute delay between emails, and each time that little ding sounds and a little flag icon pops up on your taskbar, you’re distracted from what you’re doing. To get the answer to a one-line question, you have to write six emails and burn a half hour of your time.

Today, we get excited when we manage to empty an inbox, as if it were an accomplishment. The effort we put into this daily disposal ritual is silly, considering most of what we receive is clutter, as Dr. Paul found in his study. Email is failing because it’s not productive to spend hours managing your means of communication.